Anatomy of Photography

  • Introducing Anatomy of Photography
  • In 1982, I shot my first roll of Kodachrome 25, and from that moment on became immersed in making colour photography.
  • Kodachrome was a remarkable colour transparency film, made from 1936 to 2009. At the time that Kodak ceased to sell it, I wrote a brief elegy about its history, its qualities, and the particular skills and aesthetics that they fostered.
  • Photography and memory are of course intimately bound together, for good and ill…
  • … and since once out of childhood I never kept diaries, my regular – often daily – practise of photography is the physical prop of my recollections.
  • So, for as long as I am able, I will pursue memory and photography at once, revisiting the photos that I took four decades on, bringing a remembered past and the present into juxtaposition.
  • This project will engage with the analogue past of photography, the workings and frailties of memory, how photography deforms memory, and the past that camera and film recorded.
  • The illusion of a coherent identity is assembled by the false mapping back of the ideas, attitudes, feelings, and temperament of the present personality onto past selves.
  • I remember, though currently cannot quite feel, the mental disruptions that brought me to photography in the first place.
  • It is with trepidation, then, that I reopen those old yellow boxes of slides.
  • A Catalogue of (Analogue) Errors

    A Catalogue of (Analogue) Errors

    Looking through these old slides, what leaps out is the frequency and variety of failures. Sometimes—although less than I had feared —these are compositional. I had for years before starting photography been drawing, attending life classes, and looking at artists’ drawings, which probably helped. And some of my drawings before photography had a photographic air.

    Read more…: A Catalogue of (Analogue) Errors
  • The Beginning of Spring

    The Beginning of Spring

    My father rescued this damaged statue from his mother’s garden, where it had been placed under a fountain, so that over the years the water had etched fine rivulets into its stone surface. Standing in our garden beneath a silver birch, and wreathed in holly, it wove its way into the fabric of my childhood…

    Read more…: The Beginning of Spring
  • Anatomy of Photography: Introduction

    Anatomy of Photography: Introduction

    This project will, I hope, engage those who are interested in the analogue past of photography, in the workings and frailties of memory, in the manner in which photography forms and deforms memory, and—since my photography was always at least partly documentary—in the past that camera and film recorded.

    Read more…: Anatomy of Photography: Introduction

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